Today, I got some news through a third party about someone that I know who is going through a rough patch in her life. I wanted to let this woman know that I am thinking about her when she reads this blog. This woman could be you at this very moment. You see when life has a way of happening, it is not specific about who it impacts or where you are in the world or what is going on in your own little world. There are bigger forces at work. It is my belief that just like you, she can read this and not respond to me. So let me help her and perhaps help or at least enlighten you also.
When we find ourselves in great need and everything around us is "broken", where do you run and turn for help?
Who do you think of FIRST?
This answer will be different for each of you reading this. If you are married you might try to reach out to your spouse. If you are a college aged person, you might reach out to your parents. Who do you think of first?
When I am in a place where my life has fallen apart, and fallen down all around me, something from deep inside me takes over and I became a "vessel" of recovery. I do not reach out to anyone. I think that instinctual reaction comes from my years of being a dependent of a military officer. As a dependent, you are pulled up every three years and plopped down in a new country, a new school, and a new environment and you are the only person you can depend on. You just begin to draw on your past experiences and you assess the situation and the people around you who are in your life very, very quickly. But, I want to present this idea to you as one of your with options. I believe that you too possess this vessel deep inside your core and I think that you may not have tapped into it yet or to the extent that you could.
The very first thing to do is; to let the feelings wash over you and to release them.
If you are in devastation, feel that completely. You will eventually cry yourself out and release all that pent up emotion inside. Let that grief, anxiety, and fear flow out. This may take some time. There are no illusions here about how any one thing affects each of us, just some facts that agencies like the Red Cross and others collect and use to put strategies together. Each of us reacts differently and our recovery time (to get our wits about us) is different. So for us those figures and charts and time tables do not matter. What matters is what is right in front of us which is our personal crisis.
You might even be in survivor mode and that is OK. Take care of what is immediate.
When you get to the point that you cannot breathe out of your nose..and your anger begins to set in with that all too familiar rant of "why did this have to happen to me…" you are now ready to do some real work at regaining your footing and putting your life back together.
Here's what I know, when life happens to us, we cannot always wait for "help" to come riding up in a Red Cross truck nor can we always depend on having a US Army helicopter drop us relief supplies to help us out.
Once we have "released" all of that tension we have literally made "space" inside our head in order to actually T-H-I-N-K. It is from this space that we can begin to our recovery and our rebuilding.
Are you following so far?
Next time we will explore what to do next.
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Yesterday, I was in my living room "supervising" a project and listening to our grand piano which is a "disklavier" (which means it will play piano music for you). I had placed one of my favorite Broadway Musicals on "Les Miserables" . As I was swept away in the music I was suddenly aware that I seemed to be "looking outward" from within myself. I must admit it did seem strange for a moment (you know when you suddenly feel like you might be experiencing vertigo and you are sitting in a chair). I was observing my home environment with the eyes of someone half my age. Perhaps it was the song that was playing; "I Dreamed A Dream", with those words about: "…voices tearing you down…", "…days filled with endless wonder…", "..there are dreams that cannot be…", "….and …now life has killed the dream I dreamed…", those are powerful phrases and in hind sight of ones life they are very revealing.
When we were young, our days were filled with endless wonder and our days were filled with dreams of how our life might be. I know I spent a lot of time staring out the classroom window wishing no longing to be somewhere else doing something infinitely more exciting that what was on the board. When I was in high school and in college, I spent a great deal of my day in rehearsal rooms practicing, on stage in rehearsals and in front of large audiences singing and performing in solos, operas, choruses, plays and vignettes which all made me enormously happy and sent my heart, soul and mind soaring and I was on a constant high when I was engaged in these activities. Although I was very, very good, life had another path for me to follow and it was not on stage, not even in community or church theater. My children used to ask me: "….Mom, please don't really sing the National Anthem……just mouth the words…; isn't that telling! When you have been trained for some 24 years as a professional vocalist, you tend to stand out and overwhelm those in the bleachers at a ball game when you sing.
Even now, when I am in the privacy of my car and a song comes on the radio or a CD that I am listening to, I have to open my mouth and sing. It is like asking the wind to stop blowing or the rain to stop. It is who I am at my core. I am a person enveloped in music. It is in my DNA! I had no preconceived notions of being on stage at Lincoln Center, that was never my ultimate purpose of direction. I just wanted to be appreciated and participate in the places where I could lift up others by using my voice, whether it was in my local choir at church or in a local community production of something just to give me a deposit into my deep hole for the gift I was given.
To this day, I cannot sit in a performance anywhere in the world (and believe me when I say I have sat in the great opera houses of the world and in the orchestra section of the great theaters) and see a production that I sang in, in my youth. You would have to put a pair of rolled up athletic socks in my mouth to keep my quiet. I once was at a coral production of a very famous artist in England and I had to excuse myself and go into the ladies room. To my shock there were other women in the ladies room sitting on the chairs listening and singing along with the piped in music and I just burst out laughing and they all nodded and smiled and we all knew why we were there!
OK…so do you begin to see how this "who is looking out" could play out in your own life?
What is the dream that you dreamed when you were young?
What killed it?
Is there still a hole there which has a deep longing to be filled?
Do you secretly still fantasize what be in that dream today would be like?
We all have to start somewhere. Where are you starting from?
That little girl who is looking out into your big adult world is still waiting to sing to her own music. She is waiting to win the Grand Slam. She is there waiting to ring the opening bell on Wall Street. She is there waiting to…..
This is becoming "Aware" of the dream that is within you. There are many ways in which you can start to live that dream. There are appointments for you to keep out there in your future where you can begin to make a deposit into that emptiness where fulfillment lives. You can go there and you can live the dream, perhaps not in the exact manner in which a "child's mind" views it, but you can get a taste of it.
What is your dream?
How many times do each of us stop dead in our tracks and ask this all to familiar question: "Who Am I?"
Have you ever looked into the mirror late at night after a particular rough day and said: "WHO IS THAT!?" Not even recognizing your own image staring back at you.
I know I sure have so what causes us to take "pause" and as this perplexing question of "Who Am I?"
It is my experience that we ask the question when we become unglued, out of balance, stretched to far or pushed to our breaking limits in too many areas in our lives all at the same time. After all, have you ever know a "Problem" or a "Challenge" to just appear in your calendar on a day when you have the time to take of it in a calm rational manner with plenty of time to think about all the "ifs" ', ands" and "buts"…of course not.
So when you are in a non-frazzled mode and the day has played out pretty calmly, and you ask yourself: "Who am I?" really? Deep inside who am I at my deepest core being?
I know that for myself, I have asked this question many, many times at certain ages, transitions, milestones, and seasons in my live. What I have noticed is that I am "evolving" into a complete whole "woman". I did not start out this way. No. Not by a long shot. When I walked into my college dorm room I was a certain young woman. When I walked down the isle to take my husband's hand, I was another woman, when I took my first child into my arms I was another more mature woman. When I held my second child, I was complete as a mother. With every move from state to state, with every new job, with every new elementary school, middle school and high school, I grew and matured as a woman in many deepening ways. As I watched our children walk across the stage and graduate from High School, then from College and then from Graduate School, I felt a feeling of completion and launching and pride that I would never have recognized in my twenties.
When I looked in the mirror after we had settled our youngest in another state after her college graduation and had helped her to move away, I did look in the mirror and ask: Who Are You? What is it that you do now? Who Do You Want To Be? After all that chapter of "motherhood" and the day to day mothering you did for the past 28 years is now at an end for the most part. So what now?
It has been two years since I asked that question. I know that I am still modeling that answer in a unique and special way. I do know a couple of very key components about Who I AM….
I am a woman who feels complete.
I am a woman who feels deeply loved.
I am a woman who feels deeply about helping other women feel complete and fulfilled.
I am a mentor.
I am an inspirational motivator of other women.
I know, I know how to "unlock" the hearts and minds of women in order to give them permission to "think and explore who they are and who they want to be".
I know, that I love to create capable greatness in young women and women of all ages.
I know that I am a keen observer of life and that I have a special gift of intuition that serves me very well.
I know that I love to encourage other people.
This list could go on for pages, but you get the idea.
Who are you?
Look in the mirror tonight and let me know!
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